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Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures
Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures, also known as Unlimited Adventures, or by the acronyms FRUA or UA, is a video game originally released on March 17, 1993, by Strategic Simulations, Inc. for the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. Gameplay Unlimited Adventures is essentially a role-playing game construction kit, and draws on the prior Gold Box engine games for its content. SSI's contract with TSR, Inc. required the former to stop using the Gold Box engine, so the company released its development tools. A player could create hundreds of different monsters, triggers as part of adventure design on the computer. The chief feature of interest in this computer role-playing game is that it contains an editor that allows the user of the game to create new adventures that anyone else who owns the game can play. The game uses a variant of TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules in the gameplay. The engine within which adventures are played is based on the Gold Box engine that made its debut in the game Pool of Radiance, although some improvements have been made (for instance, the color depth has been increased from 4 bits to 8 bits). Despite possessing features that, today, are considered limited (such as a 320×200 pixel resolution), the versatility and ease of use offered by this engine have created a community of users who remain active to the present day. The original game allowed the user to create dungeon modules, some editing and renaming of monsters and characters, and to import pictures and monster sprites. However, some art, such as walls, combat backdrops, and title screens, could not be changed in the unmodified game. Those deficiencies have been overcome by a now fairly extensive library of hacks, which allow the designer to change things not changeable in the game out of the box. Other hacks allow the designer to alter the game play itself: to create new weapons and other items, to alter spells, and to change other aspects of gameplay. The availability of these hacks has led to the creation of a number of comprehensive "worldhacks", designed to allow the creation of science fiction, superhero, Western and Roman Empire adventures, among others. A program called "UASHELL" applies and manages these hacks and enables the player to apply them. The fanmade game design program Dungeon Craft (originally called UA Forever) is a standalone program that partially emulates FRUA's engine, but with a greater ease of user modification. More than seven hundred adventure designs have been created for this game. They vary widely in quality, and the best of them are comparable in depth to the original commercial releases. Compilations Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures is included in the compilation "The Forgotten Realm Archives - Collection Two" Reception SSI sold 32,364 copies of Unlimited Adventures. Computer Gaming World in 1993 called it "the best adventure-construction kit available" despite the "sorely lacking" Gold Box engine. According to GameSpy in 2004, although "the game's graphics were poor ... and using the tools could be a little complicated, Unlimited Adventures was an excellent tool for budding RPG designers". References External links * *The FRUA & Dungeon Craft Community Forums: The Unofficial FRUA/Dungeon Craft Forum for Module Designers and Players *The Magic Mirror: The largest FRUA resource online *Dungeon Craft at Sourceforge *Dungeon Craft at The Ironworks Category:1993 video games Category:DOS games Category:Forgotten Realms video games Category:Gold Box games Category:Mac OS games Category:Role-playing video games Category:Strategic Simulations games Category:Tactical role-playing video games Category:Video game development software Category:Video games developed in the United States Category:Video games featuring protagonists of selectable gender Category:Video games scored by George Sanger Category:Video games with oblique graphics Category:Video games with user-generated gameplay content